Friday, 16 December 2016

A Year of Leadership Research and Commentary at the University of Cumbria

For many people 2016 was a year for wondering how we end up
with the leaders we have. Some respond to that concern by calling for more and
better leadership. At the University of Cumbria, leadership development has
been a cross-cutting theme of our work for years, due to our focus on the
public professions. With the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability
(IFLAS) we extend that into the field of private sector management, supporting
the performance of business leaders in addressing social and environmental
issues.

Resignation

Although primarily focused on education, the University of
Cumbria is increasingly active in research on leadership and its development.
The following are some of the highlights of our research outputs in 2016. Leading schools is a key task in any country, and difficult
within a context of budget cuts. Dr Paul Cammack, Senior Lecturer with our
Institute of Education, worked on a new ‘Guide
for the Evaluation of School Leaders’. This was an output from an Erasmus+
Project called ‘Evaluation of School Leaders and Teachers’ Practice’ with
School Inspectors from Italy, Basque Country in Spain, Italy, Romania,
Lithuania and the Open University, Cyprus. You can read more about the project here
and follow them on twitter.
Also in the education sector, Dr Sally Elton-Chalcraft presented research with
Cumbria colleagues on the use of coaching techniques in leadership, at the
British Educational Research Association. Sally can be contacted here
for a copy.

At IFLAS, one of our research activities is to chronicle the
leadership development practices we use on the suite of MBA programmes taught
out of Ambleside. The Institute Manager Philippa Chapman and Dr Grace Hurford
presented lessons from that on the University’s “Perspectives in Experiential
Learning in Higher Education” conference last March. To read about this
approach, contact Philippa.

As a Professor with IFLAS, I continued to develop a theory of sustainability
leadership, working with Dr Neil Sutherland of UWE and Richard Little of Impact
International. In the process, I presented a conference paper on the impasse in leadership
studies, which is available here.
In a related vein, we are now in the final stages of editing a special issue of
the Sustainability Accounting Management
and Policy Journal (SAMPJ) on Leadership and Sustainability.That special issue came out of the Leading Wellbeing
Festival in 2015, and in 2016 IFLAS continued to work with the Brathay Trust on
curating engaged scholarship in this field, with the “Leading Wellbeing in
Rural Contexts” conference in November 2016. Opened by our new Vice
Chancellor, Professor Julie Mennell, and co-facilitated by IFLAS-associated Senior
Lecturer Tony Randall, the event has inspired a special issue of the Journal of Corporate Citizenship. That
will be edited by IFLAS Deputy Director Dr David Murphy, Professor Alison
Marshall and Dr Elaine Bidmead, of our Cumbrian Centre for Health Technologies
(CaCHeT). The deadline
for abstracts is the end of January. Our 2017 event theme and date will be announced in the new year.The UK referendum result on leaving the EU triggered a lot
of debate about leadership, and there were leadership contests for the two
largest parties. In the media, many refrains of leadership were heard, with
ideas like “strong” leadership quoted unquestioningly. Therefore, I wrote an
article for the Huffington Post that critiqued the narratives about leadership
and suggested social movements require a different
form. Then I was asked by the Young Global Leaders network of the World
Economic Forum to share thoughts on spirituality and transformative leadership,
also on the Huffington
Post. I returned to some of the themes on a more conscious and reflective
form of leadership in a Keynote speech on Climate Leadership, at Griffith
University in Australia. I shared my background notes on the talk here.

In 2017 I begin a research project, backed by Impact International, to explore
how successful leaders in business, government and civil society, who operate
internationally, perceive leadership on global dilemmas, like climate change,
inequality, financial crisis and extremism. I would welcome enquiries from
anyone interested in cosponsoring this work to help us reach a wider audience (iflas@cumbria.ac.uk). I will be sharing
some of the initial insights of this research with colleagues at a one day
event “Questioning Leadership” on July 18th in Carlisle. The event is primarily
for internal collaboration, and will be marketed in February, but if interested already, contact Professor
Pete Boyd.

In 2017 I anticipate welcoming two new PhD students to IFLAS
to work with me on leadership development in the face of environmental
dilemmas. Both the sustainability and leadership fields have been pervaded by
ideas of potency and positivity. At first glance, that may sound sensible. Butin our research, we will be exploring how
this framing is being shaken by recent information, and how it might even be
restricting creative and collective responses. These PhD students will join a growing team, including Jo
Chaffer, who started with IFLAS in 2016 to conduct doctoral research on
leadership development through outdoor influences on identity.